this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 days ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

re you sure they’re digitizing Book By the Yard quality material?

They were more than happy to gobble up Reddit posts and Twitter farts and the worst of 4chan. You don't need to ingest Ulysses exclusively to train a system.

Doing anything physical, especially at scale, is slow and expensive.

Which is why you get people paid pennies an hour to break the physical copies down and feed them into scanners.

would guess a good portion of these books, perhaps an outright majority, have simply never been digitized.

Possibly not. But that's a sign it isn't great literature or coveted texts.

[–] isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago

You're confusing uniqueness with quantity. 4chan posts are not Ulysses, but they are still useful data.

My point was not that they would refuse to scan Book By the Yard quality works because they would consider them unsuitable. My point was that they don't need to scan mass market Book by the Yard stuff, as they already have digital copies of it.

And scanning books is not as cheap as you think it is. Even using labor in low income countries, the cost of scanning is still vastly greater than just downloading a file.